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This Week in Startups

AOL Co-founder Steve Case Interview
Steve Case talks about his role in the internet revolution & gives us an innovation roadmap in his new book, “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future”

My favorite blogger/blog of the moment…

Since I gave Nick a hard time about Gawker.com’s pages/status falling off a cliff earlier today, I figured I’d talk about Gawker’s best blog and blogger.

The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating. 🙂

Gina is the Peter Rojas/Ryan Block of software… for real.

She’s grown LifeHacker from nothing to 7M pages last month–that’s big time. At 7M pages at a $5 -12 RPM (revenue per thousand pages) means that LifeHacker is doing $35k to $84k a month in revenue. That’s $400k to $1M a year in revenue… that’s very, very real.

At this point LifeHacker has to Gawker Media’s best property after Gizmodo.

Update: Someone asked me how I got to the $5-12 RPM number. Let me explain. RPM is revenue per thousand pages. You get this number by adding up the value of all the ads on the page. In LifeHackers case that is three graphical ads and the text links on the side of the page. The leaderboard is a $12-15 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) unit, the skyscraper is an $8-12CPM unit, and the medium rectangle down the page is a $4-8CPM unit. The text links are another $1-2CPM. If you sold those units out at full price at the low end of the range ($12 + $8 + $4 + $1 = $25 CPM) you would make 7,000 x $25, or $175,000 a month. At the high-end of the range even more–but most deals are not at the highend of course. Also, very few blogs are sold out, so if LifeHacker sold 1/7th of their inventory that would be $25k a month, if they sold out half their inventory that would be $80k a month–you get the idea. My guess is they sell 1/3rd and are doing $50k a month or $600k a year. That makes LifeHacker worth 5-10x the revenue number in this market to a buyer, or $3-6M. That is what someone like CNET would pay for it. In a don market you might get 2-4x revenue, or $1-2M.